I know that Lola asks these kinds of questions for Sex Magazine’s blog. My least favorite answers are the ones that are young people saying something pithy and small and correct, and my favorite answers are when old guys crash out, which I guess I’ll just do here.

A magazine used to be something that was made in an office, and printed and shipped and bought and read, that was filled with advertisements, that was the only place you could see a certain photograph or read a certain article, it was something that you touched to feel connected to something that was really fucking far away and out of reach. I was a kid in high school in Canada and I went to the library and they had Spin with Fiona Apple on the cover shot by some guy I would find out later was Terry Richardson and some Sean Landers comic on the back and I could look at the cool pictures and album reviews and ads and it made me feel great.

Later on in art school I would go to the library and read back issues of Index, which is still my favorite magazine ever. I never liked Vice, and if I did I definitely wouldn’t admit it to anyone.

On the top floor of this bookstore in Vancouver they had rows and rows of international magazines like that issue of The Face with all the kids from Larry Clark movies on the cover that seemed expensive or unnecessary at the time but I wish I’d bought or stole all of them because each issue is now worth hundreds on Ebay and I wouldn’t sell them for that anyways.

I actually interned at Index. I was 19 and had no idea what I was doing. I was in New York for the first time and would literally forget that I’d been sent on an errand to pick something up and deliver it to the office, and would waste hours just bopping around Soho. Amazingly enough there was another intern there that was even more inept that got fired. Nothing about that experience taught me anything about how to work at or start or run or be a part of a magazine. Even right when I was in the middle of it, it felt impossibly far away.

I kind of forgot about magazines after that. I got really wrapped up in the art world, and then the internet, and it wasn’t really until 2010 that I realized that magazines were shutting down and that there hadn’t been a cool good movie in like 5 years that I realized that I wanted to make something functional. But in many ways I was too late. Tumblr was way more interesting than any website, let alone anything printed. It was self-curated, and fast and surprising and intense and there was no way any single publication could ever compete with that. The same goes for Instagram. No matter how shitty and depressing and soul sucking a social network is, the truth is that it scratched whatever itch that magazines had previously scratched and there was no going back. And hilariously that was when I decided to start my own publication, bless my heart.

But what is a magazine? I don’t know. It’s something that you do when you don’t want to make art, don’t want to write, don’t want to take photos, but want to do something that involves all those things. Not many people want to do that anymore. Interview is amazing. Anything Richard Turley works on is.

I like that Cosmo has people like Richard Kern shooting their covers and you can buy them at a drug store but the printing is cheap in the wrong way and the layout is lame. I look up the word magazines on Facebook Marketplace and see that someone has a stack of Nylon from 2004 – 2010. One has Cory Kennedy on the cover. I’ve got to get that.